In Defense of Armond White

I'm
even more tired of defending him—to myself, most of all. Armond White doesn't
make it easy on those of us who like, or at least tolerate, him. He's
needlessly combative, explosively arrogant and self-defensive in equal
measures, and disingenuous in his argumentation against those who disagree with
him. Your Latin dictionary should probably have a picture of him next to the
definition of ad hominem. Over the last decade, his writing has
become increasingly opaque, often to the point of incoherence, while he's
become more and more caustic and condescending about his vagaries. ("If
you can't understand my florid ineloquence and inarticulate profusions,
it's your fault," he seems to say.) He's grandiose in his
opinions while offering few substantive details to buttress said opinions. His
sentences seem coated in butter; the more you try to latch onto their meaning,
the messier and more slippery they get.

But a defense is still required. Here it is.

Armond White is an important, distinctive, and (okay, I'll
say it) necessary voice in film criticism. He's no troll, and he's one of the
few critics capable of noting the inherent—and latent—racism of much of cinema
and its discourse. In his writing at City Arts, Film Comment and the now-defunct City Sun and New York Press (where he wrote alongside Matt Zoller Seitz and Godfrey Cheshire), he has provided a rare black voice, and perhaps an even rarer conservative voice, to film/video commentary. White is fluent in pop culture outside of
cinema, academic theory, religion and politics, and brings it all into his
writing. He throws brickbats at stuff I
love, sure, but I've got thick skin, and his provocations serve to
jostle me out of received opinions and consensus feedback.

If
nothing else, Armond White—like almost no one else in today's mainstream
American film criticism—makes me consider why I like what I like, and to
learn to defend it against his attacks. In his essays, he points the way to
classics (American and otherwise) that I might not have otherwise considered,
and unearths underdog gems on a regular basis. He makes seemingly bizarre
juxtapositions that, more often than not, grow to feel correct upon reflection,
and that show the ways in which cinema is itself a bizarre concatenation of
different modes, technologies, discourses, and genres. Just as White's chosen
art form is hybrid, so too is his criticism, and it's odd to note how rare this
trait is in film commentary.

And
now, after serving as its chair more than once, Armond White has been kicked out of the New York
Film Critics Circle, basically
for making an ass of himself at the NYFCC awards banquet during a presentation
for "12 Years A Slave." (White was not a fan.) Now, to be fair, he probably was disruptive and
uncivil. He's made a habit of that in his prose for 30 years, calling those who disagree with him "fools,"
"charlatans," and "simpletons." He's no stranger to
personal attacks and look-at-me theatrics.

But
I don't actually know what went down at that banquet and neither, in all
likelihood, do you. Accounts vary. White's denial of the allegations is predictably self-serving and incoherent. Available recordings aren't
conclusive.

Still,
let's be honest. Dude's being kicked out for heckling?

Are
we adults here?

A
rundown: A Very Important Movie About A Painful Subject—that I admittedly have
not seen, so have no dog in that fight—gets booed by a dissenting critic, a
position that said dissenting critic is entitled to take. Dissenting critic
then sees the film critics association to which he belongs extol the movie's
virtues, and decides to sneer further at the obtuseness of those who praise the
Very Important Movie at an event that happens to have an open bar. He then gets excommunicated from said
society for heckling a film and director that
he's made it clear that he hates.

All
of this is complicated by the fact that said Painful Subject is slavery, and
thus intrinsically tangled up in race, and the trauma that this country has
inflicted upon itself from its genesis. The dissenting critic is
black. The filmmaker is black. The film's subject is, largely,
blackness. Almost everyone else in the story is white.

Presumably,
of course, the dissenting critic (Armond White) is overly rude, disrespectful
and, when responding angrily to allegations that he denies about himself,
sensitive. Of course. Because no white critic has ever responded overbearingly
to a black writer's criticisms of white discourse. No black critic has ever had
reason to think whites praise a "black" movie for all the wrong,
patronizing, soul-crushing reasons.

I'm
not defending White's awards banquet razzing of
"12 Years a Slave," which I have every reason to think happened, based on White's own record of rowdiness at these dinners, and as a public figure generally. From a public-relations standpoint, the man
is his own worst enemy, and his assertion that his peers' censure is "a shameless attempt to squelch the strongest voice that exists
in contemporary criticism" makes my head hurt. Even among prominent
African-American critics, I'm not convinced White is the most incisive. There's Elvis Mitchell, Steven Boone, Odie Henderson and Wesley Morris, formerly of
The Boston Globe, now of Grantland, and one of a handful of film critics of any
color to win the Pulitzer for criticism.

Nevertheless,
no other African American critic incites, either through their writing or their
public remarks, the kind of ire that has accompanied White throughout his
career.

There's no point arguing whether White’s writing or his public persona
is the bigger irritant, because his entire career—beginning with his 1980s run
at the City Sun—has been based on
conflating the two. Following the model of Pauline Kael, whom White
acknowledges as a key influence, he makes his personal investment in his
criticism part of the package.

But it is still worth considering, however briefly, the notes that White strikes in
his writing, and the actual arguments that he makes, and then compare them to
similar sentiments expressed by other people who aren't as widely reviled, and
are in fact beloved precisely because they challenge conventional thinking.

When we do that, we may have to admit that, however self-serving it may be,
there's something to White's protestation that he's being held to a unique
standard and treated with singular harshness—that perhaps, as Nirvana sang,
“just because you’re paranoid / doesn’t mean they’re not after you.”

Which brings us to Jonathan
Rosenbaum, formerly of The Chicago Reader and one of the most politically
concerned and globally trenchant of working critics. Rosenbaum called McQueen's film "an arthouse exploitation gift to masochistic guilty liberals
hungry for history lessons, some of whom consider any treatment of American
slavery by a black filmmaker to be an unprecedented event, thus overlooking
Charles Burnett's far superior 'Nightjohn.'"

This sentiment's pretty much what White wrote about McQueen's movie, down to the
Burnett reference. But Rosenbaum wrote it two months after White, and had the
privilege of being, um, white, and so he wasn't blamed for wrecking
the film's Rotten Tomatoes percentage, much less written off as a troll who was playing contrarian to generate page clicks.

Speaking
of which: White is often blasted as a critic who doesn't believe
half the things he writes, and intentionally goes against the critical grain
to garner attention for himself. This claim is belied by the NYFCC's own
evidence. Yes, McQueen may have jeered McQueen's nod as Best Director. But
"American Hustle", the group's choice for best film, is one that White praised highly.

And as a commenter on the Hollywood Reporter's story about the brouhaha pointed out, it's not as if White's list of
canonical films is absurd, or even terribly adventurous.

Here is the
contrarian White's Top 10 list from the 2012 Sight & Sound poll:

We
can quibble over lists, and critics make entire careers out of doing such
things, but White's canon seems respectful and mainstream enough to my eyes.
Antonioni, Dreyer, Mizoguchi, Godard, Truffaut, Welles—these aren't outré choices. Even if they were, are we seriously claiming White as a
knee-jerk contrarian because he dared to dislike "12 Years a Slave",
and to (allegedly) say so publicly? Or because he goes against the number-crunching
at Metacritic?

Again,
are we actually adults here?

I
know, I know. The knee-jerk to White's knee-jerk is that he (gasp!) actually likes Michael Bay's cinema, especially "Transformers". And, yeah, I
think that franchise is crappy, too. But he's entitled to think otherwise, and
we shouldn't dismiss White's entire critical oeuvre just because he likes a guy
whose reputation is being rehabilitated as the vanguard of "vulgar auteurism," anyway. If we can still anoint Roger Ebert
as a critical saint after giving three stars to "Tomb Raider" none to Alex Cox's "Walker" (a film that’s now part of the Criterion
Collection), then perhaps we should let White own a few outlying
opinions without relegating him to the dustbin.

Critics
make mistakes. They like movies that popular audiences dismiss. They go against
the grain, in part because they have a deeper knowledge of cinema than most
audiences. Sometimes they're wrong. But sometimes they know things, and see
things, that the rest of us don't.

White is informed about cinema. More importantly, he cares
passionately about it. If he contends in his initial review that "12 Years
a Slave" is so hateful that it "didn't need to be filmed this way and
I wish I never saw it," why should we be surprised that he excoriates the
praise heaped upon it? And why, given his revulsion, should we insist that he
pretend he's all right with the praise, solely to preserve decorum at a
tuxedoes-and-canapés event?

And
even if you accept that White—or if not White, the tablemates that he failed to
control—behaved
badly at an awards ceremony, does that offense necessitate an emergency
meeting, much less an outright dismissal from a group in which was a three-time president and dues-paying member? Isn't this a behavioral issue that could have been solved
by disinviting White and his entourage from future dinners, or perhaps asking the wait
staff and security at next year's dinner to keep an eye on White's table and
nip any problems in the bud before they had a chance to become problems?

Even
if we agree that rude behavior at awards dinners is unacceptable—and I do—what
does it have to do with anything beyond the dinners themselves?

Nothing.

White
has always lacked decorum, often to his detriment. He can be appallingly
childish. But this contretemps exposes a deeper, more systemic childishness, an
unwillingness to tolerate dissenting opinion under the guise of promoting
"respect" and decorum. Sometimes it is decorum itself that is
stifling, that shuts down debate, that maintains a harmful status quo, and that needs to be dismantled so that rigorous,
full-bodied, multifaceted criticism can flourish. Isn't that what a critics'
circle should be striving toward?

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